Downriver from the manganese smelting facility, where the shore grass is smudged as with blackener and the kingfisher’s eerie discolorations are entries on the nettled page of an antiphonary that testifies to the intrapenetrability of all things, the columbine and jelofer, the gradually unrolling leaves in midday sun, the conical stockpile volumes for ashes, wet and dry, for cinders, coke, and coal, for concrete, rubble, earth, and gravel, for rain on the green undergrowing tangle and the miscellaneous quadrangle green with saxifrage and mint—and oddly there are people there, living off the land, the egg-like land, which is oval, and wobbling and speckled blue and brown.

Day In, Day Out

Day in, day out the fountains spraying high prisms skyward, day in day out, the primrose, the coordinated and patterned municipal fountains, the sheet of water over green veined marble, serpentine, day in black letter, the deuterocanonical streets, day out of sequence, burning daylight, hanging fire, the vegetable prebendary, fantastico and ushered in with little fanfare like the beginning of a spelling book, always letter A for Announce and A priori— the beginning before the beginning, predawn, day in, day out the office towers lighting up for commerce in the shadow arrondissement.

Ithaca

In the pointed shadow of the gable, the full grown watercress, a stream running along the path where the May poles have been erected as if to commemorate the indifference of the planet, its militant indifference, its gorges, overgrown with tinfoil leafage rusted power trains chokeberry your whole life overgrown with the pink froth produced in the manufacture of soap flowing down from the mechanized steeples of the slumberingly giant industrial park its full grown gables and acronyms harnessing the power of sleep and stigmatizing it for its uselessness. I went down into its gorges to watch the sturdy watercress the antelope and badger nuzzling the May poles and studying numerology and the other creatures in their new felt robes testing the borders of the wilderness unsure where it ended and the city with its bent gables and May poles and windows hypnotized by light began.

The Parable of the Bell

The Parable of the Bell— was it really a parable? The ebullient fellowship of children in their natural habitat, the endless wood made golden by the eclogue, sudden as a bright sash of incandescence—unnatural

as creeds—the colorless elk behind the green bay laurel just as childish and unbelievable as chimes, just as native to the sky and what the children put there. Was it a real bell? Are there steeples in the oceanic cliffsides, ringing out as glassily as seaspray and cracking through the pods of sleep? So let them sleep, for now, dreaming in the parable, of the parable, waiting for the requiem.

Sculptures Along the Hudson River

A river, and a strange city behind it. On this side the big granite blocks lapped at by the water like blockheads overtaken by new thoughts. In the middle the brilliant water and the gabled boats. Behind them the sharp spires, the pinking shears jutting upward, giant keys and skeleton keys that standeth tall as fire-branded flags; the factories and the hospital with its hidden hospital catacombs, a nightingale, silent, the tips of quoits erect, wingtips, a row of summoners, man-made waterfalls of triumph. Here beside the river some sculptress hath taken up a driftwood log and set it in the granite, and strung it with string and sticks and Styrofoam projections. What do you know— I’m sitting under a cherry tree, reflecting.

Nearly Still Life

Beside an enormous ledger, five pale-green eggs on a bed of cotton, a string of glass beads; a chunk of green obsidian; a Chinese coin; an unidentifiable skull, small and precious as an eggshell; a pair of wire spectacles; a sheet of canvas hanging from a curtain rod; a breeze smelling of sea salt. A wheel, a sword, a rusted bell; a tea cup, porcelain, and in the tea cup a blue and pink sea anemone, its tentacles asway.